A few minutes later, he stood up and started pacing, deep in thought. She surreptitiously admired the interplay of his muscles visible beneath his well-tailored clothes as he moved. He stopped suddenly and looked at her.
“I need to check with Zheer first, but we might be going on a little field trip this afternoon on the way home. I’ll be right back.” He left the conference room, then poked his head back in. “If we’re done in time, are you up for a longer run tonight?”
“Yes.” She wondered if he’d been keeping the runs short out of consideration for her, but he was gone before she could ask.
She would need to get some food to keep in her apartment after she went off-shift that night. She’d become careless about remembering to eat properly while being just an anonymous night-shift guard with dull senses and a dull mind, and no one to protect but herself.
Foxe came back a few minutes later. “Grab your coat. We’re on.” He folded the display and made a hasty attempt to reorder the conference room. “The data analysts have been deep-diving in Leo’s files. He was working with an informant, all right, but not from the transport company, someone from Loyduk Pharma.” He looked at her expectantly.
“The vaccine distributor,” she said, and he grinned as if he thought her clever to remember. She regretted she couldn’t tell him what she’d overheard at the spaceport.
“Producer and distributor, in fact.” His intuition was lighting up, making him as energized as she’d seen him. She followed him down the hall and waited in the doorway of his office as he grabbed his bag and shrugged into his coat. “The analysts found an interesting address here in Etonver. The leaseholder of record doesn’t have ties to anything in this case.”
“But you think otherwise?”
“Leo did, and so do I. He was a damn good finder, and it’s the only untagged data in his files. Hidden in plain sight.” That meant nothing to her, but it was clearly significant to Luka.
She exited the building first and scanned their surroundings as she held the door open for him.
The wind was bitingly frigid, making the drafty underground parking area colder than usual. Mairwen opened the vehicle with her palmprint, then pulled on her gloves as she got in. La Plata’s vehicles, while armored and secure, were more utilitarian than luxurious, and didn’t have heated operating controls. Foxe sat in the front seat next to her and wired the address to the vehicle’s navcomp. As she pulled out onto the street and turned north, as the navcomp indicated, she asked, “Do you have an appointment?”
“No. A hunch.” He was calling something up on his percomp, but she couldn’t see what. She nodded, but he didn’t notice.
Even though she’d only known him for a few days, she already knew that when his mind was blazing, he was lost to the outside world. There was no point asking why he felt the need to go now, in person, or what he expected to find.
For once, there were no obstructions to clog traffic, so it only took fifteen minutes to get to their destination, which turned out to be a huge apartment complex with multiple buildings and floors, plus a large vehicle lift and flitter hangar on top. Mairwen thought it looked rather like conjoined university dormitories. Since Etonver had no zoning regulations to speak of, and real estate changed usage and ownership often, the buildings may once have been exactly that.
With guidance from a battered lobby kiosk, she and Foxe rode a lift to the third floor, crossed a bridge to another building, then took a lift up two more floors. The apartment in question, leased to one Vadra Amhur, was all the way to the back of the building at the end of a deadend hallway.
When they finally found the right hallway, she knew there was trouble. It reeked of day-old death. Even normal senses would have caught it by now if the hallways hadn’t been so cold.
She stepped in front of Foxe to stop him. “Security first.”
He hesitated, then nodded.
She walked toward the apartment, listening for sounds from any of the other apartments but hearing none. She hoped she was wrong and that the reek came from somewhere else, but it didn’t. Beyond the innocuous door that matched all the others were fluids and blood and a corpse. She doubted Foxe would like it.
She walked back to where he stood.
“It smells,” she said in a low voice. “Like the warehouse. Should I look?”
“Fökk,” he said grimly, running his fingers through his unruly hair once, then again, a resigned look settling on his face. “Do it.”
The electronic lock was old and cheap, and someone had already breached it. She slowly nudged the door open a bit, took a second to dial back her olfactory sense so the increased stench that wafted out wouldn’t overload her, then opened the door just enough to slip inside. She adjusted her vision to compensate for the shadows in the apartment and find the lighting controls.
Three meters from the entrance, a woman’s naked body was zip-tied to an overturned chair. There was blood splatter everywhere. It hadn’t been a pleasant death.
Mairwen backed out of the apartment and returned to Foxe.
“It’s bad,” she said. “Bloody.”
He closed his eyes a moment and muttered a curse. He took a deep breath and looked at her. “I have to see.”
She let him go in, then closed the apartment door behind them and stepped aside, her eyes on Foxe.
He held himself rigidly still, as if fighting something, but soon the despairing, haunted look she’d seen before started creeping into his expression. After first examining the floor in front of him, he took one careful step closer. He crouched down, maybe to get a better angle to examine the woman’s body, then swept his gaze side to side. He lingered over several spots, angling his head at a couple of them, but his gaze drifted back to the body and stalled. He stared as if mesmerized.
Mairwen waited quietly for a minute, watching him closely. He wasn’t moving any more, but his breathing was shallow, and she could hear his heartbeat racing. The haunted look had completely overtaken his features. After another minute, she gave into the growing conviction that she needed to do something.
“Foxe?” she asked softly.
He didn’t respond.
She said his name again, but he still didn’t react. She crouched down in front of him. His eyes were dilated, and tears were streaming down his face. Possibly it was like the old, bad memories, but it reminded her more of a tracker’s sensory overload trance, the first step on the road to oblivion. Not knowing what else to do, she gave his shoulder a slight push. He felt stiff.
“Foxe,” she said. Nothing.
She took off her glove and put her fingertips on his wet cheek. He didn’t react.
She narrowed her focus to just him and flattened her palm on the side of his face. “Foxe… Luka, look at me.” She willed him to respond.
Nothing. His skin felt surprisingly cool against her hand. Just as she was wondering if she should maybe ping someone for help, she saw a slow change in his expression. His lost look faded and his focus gelled on her, and his eyes met hers. His full regard rocked her.
“Mairwen,” he said, as if he was deeply amazed and relieved to see her.
When she would have dropped her hand, he caught it with his own and leaned his face into her palm. “Bíddu. Wait. Give me a moment.”
The side of his face felt warmer than before, and his dark hair against her fingers felt more wiry than it looked.
He loosened the pressure on her hand, but curled his fingers around hers as he stood. She rose with him.
“You haven’t exactly seen me at my best.” He squeezed her fingers and let go, then wiped the moisture from his face. He didn’t seem to be embarrassed by his tears, which was good, she guessed. She noticed his eyes weren’t actually hazel, they were a remarkable mix of blue and green that blended into hazel from a distance. She added the scent of his tears to her imprint of him, and helplessly wondered why even as she did it.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I need to see the back of the victim
and into the kitchen.”
He took deliberate, careful steps to the vantage point he was looking for, looking back at her a couple of times as if using her as a reference point. He crouched and did the sweeping scans with his eyes again.
Her hand felt cold, so she put her glove back on. It didn’t match the warmth of Foxe’s skin, and the emptiness in her chest was back.
Now that he wasn’t so close and inundating her senses, she detected the old scents of two other people who’d been in the room recently. She’d have to get closer to the body to know if the scents were of her killers. From the look of the wounds and the faint smell of burned flesh, they’d used a machinist’s laserwire for the torture. There was also a mix of scents, predominantly gun oil, graphite, and metal dust, smells she associated with projectile weapons. Mercs or an armed crew, perhaps.
Foxe apparently had seen all he needed and stepped back to her, stopping close enough for her to feel his body heat. “We need to notify the police, but I need a quick look through the rest of the apartment first. Come on.”
There wasn’t much to see, although once away from the powerful odors of death, Mairwen knew the two people she’d scented earlier had been sleeping in the apartment lately, one in the bedroom and one on the couch.
Back near the front door, Foxe live-pinged Zheer and told her what they’d found. Zheer promised to put the company lawyer on alert in case the police took the impetuous notion to detain or charge them.
Next, he called the police, identified himself as a La Plata investigator, and explained he’d found the body of a woman. He agreed to wait in the hallway for the police and not touch anything further.
Foxe focused on Mairwen once again. “I’m sorry, but it’s going to be a long night.”
She had the feeling he wanted to close the distance between them and pull her to him. Or perhaps she was just projecting what she wanted, despite her wary brain hissing very, very bad idea.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied, as if he was vastly surprised by it. “It’s hard to explain, but I want to. I will. Just not now.”
She could sympathize with that. She still didn’t know what to tell him about what happened with the berserker. A thought occurred to her. “It might be... simpler if the police think I’m just a driver.”
He gave her a faint smile. “Simple is good.”
He scanned the crime scene again, and looked to be in control of whatever had sent him off the deep end before. “Unless they get lucky, it’ll take them weeks to figure all this out.”
She got the distinct impression he already had.
They left the apartment, pulled the door almost closed, and waited in the hallway as instructed. He sat on the floor and leaned his back against the wall, his elbows resting on his bent knees. He looked cold and drained. She wasn’t accustomed to sitting, so she stood and waited, smothering an uncharacteristic impulse to pace. Foxe was a bad influence on her.
Eighteen minutes later, she heard four people walking together in the first corridor from the lift, along with the jangle of metal and creak of leather that spoke of a police officer’s uniform.
“Incoming,” she said, just loud enough for Foxe to hear.
He gave her a small, knowing smile in recognition of the fact that he hadn’t heard anything but knew she had. She gave him a tiny shrug to tell him she didn’t care if he knew, then smoothed her face and body to dull impassivity.
* * * * *
Luka handed a fork to Mairwen and invited her to sit at his modest round dining room table. He liked the sound of her first name, he decided. It was nice to like the name of the woman who’d saved him.
The delectable smell of the best Cantonese takeout in town filled the room. That smell was the only thing keeping him from giving in to the chills that inevitably came in the aftermath of a bad incident with his talent. He used his chopsticks to serve himself more steamed rice, then dumped the container of duck and snow peas over it.
“I can’t believe you’ve never eaten this.”
“Sheltered life.” She sampled a small bite of fried rice. “This is good.” She sounded surprised, and took a larger forkful.
He was glad all she wanted was water to drink. He might have been tempted by a good glass of wine, and it never went well with his talent.
The evening with the police had been every bit as long as he’d predicted. It was always interesting, being on the other side of the interview table, but knowing what the police were thinking and recognizing the tactics.
The detectives would have been much happier if they’d found any reason at all to think he had something to do with the woman’s death, but he was cooperative, and his alibi was good. He was asked the same questions a half-dozen times by three different people at the scene and again in the interview room at the station house.
He kept it simple, repeating that he was following up on a lead in a confidential investigation and had stumbled across the body. He’d never met Vadra Amhur, and didn’t know if the victim was her or not. No, neither he nor his driver had touched anything or seen anyone else. Yes, he’d briefly looked through the rest of the apartment in case someone else needed help. No, he couldn’t discuss the nature of the confidential investigation, but they could put in a request to La Plata’s lawyers if they liked. He knew his rights and volunteered nothing.
At the scene, he’d refused to go back into the apartment again. Considering one of their rookies had nearly passed out, the detectives couldn’t justify forcing a civilian to do it. If it hadn’t been for Mairwen, he knew he’d still be lost in the sights and sounds from the talent-driven phantasms. As the interrogation had progressed, he was privately amused at seeing her turn taciturnity into an art form. He could tell the various interviewers had mutually concluded she was possibly hard of hearing and probably dumb as a rock.
She was many surprising things, thought Luka as he ate the last bite, but dumb wasn’t one of them. Solitary, inscrutable, and impossibly lethal, if he believed what he thought he’d seen her do in front of the chems shop three days ago, but most definitely not dumb.
He was pleased to see she’d polished off the entire carton of fried rice with enjoyment. It was the first time he’d seen her show a preference for anything. A gust of wind rattled tree branches at his windows, and he shivered involuntarily.
She gave him a clinically assessing look, but there was concern behind it. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said reflexively, then remembered he’d promised her honesty. “No. I’m always cold after...” He hesitated, groping for the right words.
“A hard day?” A corner of her mouth quirked with gentle humor.
He couldn’t help but smile back, but the moment didn’t last. “After I lose control of the visions.”
“The visions that enable you to reconstruct a crime scene without instruments?” There was no accusation in her question, just a clarification of fact.
“Yeah, those.” He wasn’t surprised she’d figured out that part, as observant as she was. “It’s a talent. A unique minder talent if you accept what my telepath mother believed, or non-existent if you go by both rounds of Citizen Protection Service minder testing. Up until a year ago, it was there when I needed it and went away when I didn’t. Then I pushed it hard for a case, harder than I ever had, and now it’s strong. Stronger than I am where violence is involved.”
“The ‘Collector’ case?”
He sighed. “Yes, the ‘Collector’ case. Has everyone in the galaxy seen that helvítis publication?” It had turned the case into a bloody, salacious melodrama, complete with ultra-color evidence holos and tri-D reenactments, and was still selling billions of copies across the galaxy. “Velasco’s practically memorized it.”
“No. I read the court transcript.”
He was startled. “Why?”
“When I was assigned to you, I researched reconstruction. I found your journal articles, and the citations led me to your cour
t appearances. It was your last case of record.”
He didn’t know why he was surprised. This was the woman who’d somehow made time to read the million-word Etonver traffic study because her job now included driving him places.
He felt restless, but he forced himself to stay seated. “Ever since then, my talent is always running. I can’t shut it off. It’s like constantly getting information from everything around you. I’ve learned to not think about the low-level data, like knowing Seshulla sneaks smokes on the executive balcony, or that you walk the perimeter of my townhouse building before your shift because you know the others don’t.”
He pushed away from the table and began pacing. “Maybe it’s some sort of stress trauma tangled up with my talent because of... Now when there’s violence, the possibilities I imagine are like mórar… you might call them malevolent ghosts, forcing me to live their pain or their anger or fear, and they swamp me. I see them, hear them, feel them, and they drag me under. Like at the warehouse. Like today.”
“I provided external stimulus,” she said. “It must have helped you focus.”
He stopped pacing to look at her. He knew this side of his talent scared people, himself included. It was why he’d avoided using it in the last year, hoping it would cure itself, since self-medicating had been both destructive and useless. He was deeply relieved she was taking this all in stride. Better than he was, most days.
“When I got out of rehab after that pervert stabbed me, I tried to go back to work, but I was useless for any case with violence. My talent has always been attuned to it, to violence, but it got worse. I’d go into overload. All they could do was sedate me and haul me back to the mind shop.”
He’d come to hate waking up in medical beds.
“I resigned my commission and was looking around for a new career, except my friend Leo convinced Zheer to hire me. I agreed on condition that I don’t do violence cases.” He sighed. “This hasn’t been a good week for that.”
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